Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

I’m surprised not many people talk about this, but a big reason corporations are able to do layoffs is just that they’re doing less. At my work we used to have thousands of ideas of small improvements to make things better for our users. Now we have one: AI. It’s not that we’re using AI to make all these small improvements, or even planning on it. We’re just… not doing them. And I don’t think my experience is very unique.

I think people need to get used to the idea that the West is just going backwards in capability. Go watch CGI in a movie theatre and it's worse than 20 years ago, go home to play video games and the new releases are all remasters of 20 year old games because no-one knows how to do anything any more. And these are industries which should be seeing the most progress, things are even worse in hard-tech at Boeing or whatever.

Whenever people see old systems still in production (say things that are over 30 years old) the assumption is that management refused to fund the replacement. But if you look at replacement projects so many of them are such dismal failures that's management's reluctance to engage in fixing stuff is understandable.

From the outside, decline always looks like a choice, because the exact form the decline takes was chosen. The issue is that all the choices are bad.

The result of boomer cultural and capital domination. Millenials need to grow up and yank power from them, first starting with massive government handouts given to olds

Should I take it that you support privatizing Social Security and eliminating Medicare? That probably won't be a winning political platform with any generation.

As a first step I'd prefer to see both of them dramatically more means tested. There's no reason that someone with millions of dollars of assets should be receiving thousands of dollars a month from the state. I think this position is politically tenable with the looming cuts that will happen automatically over the next decade

That's not going to happen so you can forget about it. Means testing entitlement programs has been tried before and never got much political support from any generation or political party. It's unwise to create incentives for old people to be poor because then workers will be less likely to also save for retirement in their own separate private accounts.